Building Bridges: Reflections of a Children's Book Author

It’s been eight days since I returned from the Bridge to Literacy Summit and my brain is still on overload. 

I was honored—and, admittedly, a little surprised—when I first received the invitation to participate. Whether by luck, fate, or divine intervention, it has been one of the most serendipitous events of my writing career. As a result, I now view librarians differently. I view literacy differently. Most importantly, I view my responsibility as an author differently.

LIBRARIANS:  Respect and admiration...that's what I’ve always held for librarians. They are, after all, guardians of those intellectual treasure vessels known as books. What I don’t think I fully appreciated until this summit, however, was the fervor and personal dedication these professionals have to develop the comprehensive literacy of their students and library patrons. This comprehensive literacy includes not only reading, but writing, technology, and a host of cognitive applications. While I was able to interact with amazing individuals of various backgrounds over the course of two and a half days, I couldn’t help thinking on more than one occasion, “Wow. These librarians are no joke!”  I offer a sincere thank you to all library professionals, both school and public, for the under-appreciated work you do. LIBRARIANS ROCK!

LITERACY:  Before the summit, I pondered the theme, Building a Bridge to Literacy for African American Male Youth, largely in terms of measurable performance standards relative to reading and writing. Thanks to the information and ideas shared at the summit, however, my gut-level intuition was confirmed: The real challenge is to foster the love of reading in our children, and the earlier the better. While I plan to share more in-depth thoughts on this topic in a future blog post, my basic thoughts are these:  

• The things people like to do, they do.
• The things people get something valuable out of, they participate in.
• The things that make people feel understood, inspired, and empowered are things they will make sure they remain engaged in.

For African American male youth to relate reading/writing to these personal rewards, we must make available (as Dr. Alfred Tatum would say) all manner of enabling texts, be they mirror or window books; classic or contemporary literature; stories with main characters whose looks and varied lives reflect those of today’s African American males, or stories with characters who look and live very differently, yet share the same struggles of heart and mind. ALL the texts in the library belong to every patron, including African American male youth!  From parent, to publisher, to librarian—we must all play a role in proving to our kids the power of reading, writing, and critical thinking...and we must prove that power is available to ANYONE who chooses to grasp it. Once our nation embraces this educational philosophy, we’ll no longer need to “teach to the test.” Literacy scores will automatically rise.

RESPONSIBILITY:  Which leads to me. As an author, what will I do differently to encourage a higher level of literacy in our boys and young men? To be honest, I’m still processing that one. The concept of “enabling” texts has penetrated me deeply, though. I think it’s always been a subconscious goal of mine to create these types of books, and I believe my current titles do meet this standard. But now that I have brought this goal to my conscious mind, I can only imagine the depth and breadth of stories I’ll be able to craft! The prospect of writing original, non-didactic, inspiring tales has my creative wheels spinning. For most authors, the primary goal is to entertain the reader, and that's certainly my goal as well. But if I can write a book that becomes a part of someone’s textual lineage—a tale that becomes engraved on the foundation of his or her personal identity—then my true purpose for writing children’s books will have been realized.

New colleagues, an enhanced literacy vocabulary, and a re-vision of my purpose as an author...not a bad haul for two and a half days’ work. Thank you so much to Dr. Sandra Hughes-Hassell (School of Information & Library Science, University of North Carolina) and Dr. Irene Owens (Dean, School of Library and Information Science, North Carolina Central University) for your leadership in this ground-breaking effort.  Thanks also to the many speakers and summit members who educated and welcomed me. I look forward to building bridges with all of you.

--Tameka Fryer Brown

Some take-aways for school librarians from the Building a Bridge summit:

 

For background information and ideas, school librarians can begin by reading articles written by Sandra Hughes Hassel and students in School Library Monthly (October, 2010) >http://www.schoollibrarymonthly.com/articles/BooneRawsonVance2010-v27n2p34.html<, including the Use This Page segment >http://www.schoollibrarymonthly.com/articles/pdf/LiteracyModel-v28n3p2.pdf< that accompanies the article by Sandra Hughes Hassell and Casey Rawson published in the December 2011 issue of School Library Monthly (pages 15-17).

 

Some ideas for school librarians that emerged from the summit and from the above articles:

• Create inviting, welcoming, helpful and supportive library environments
• Create access for African-American male youth in the school library
• Work with teachers, administrators, and community members to identify and select rich and enabling texts for the library collection and to be used for literacy instruction and support
• Collaborate to provide authentic, real-world, relevant opportunities for literacy engagement
• Support book discussion groups for African-American male youth
• Actively advocate for excellence and high expectations in literacy goals for African American male youth
• Involve African-American male youth in decision-making for the school library
• Create programming that draws African-American male youth into the school library and engages them

Some resources

I recommend reading these three books below.  Although they are targeted to school educators, I believe that people who are interested in education and literacy should read these books, too. All of these books are available on Amazon, but they could also be available at your public library.

Ravitch, Diane.  The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
Ravitch was the former Assistant Secretary of Education and supported Bush's education reform.  With extensive research and documentation, she disputes the reform and offers suggestions for "real" reform.

Gallagher, Kelly. Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It.
Sometimes we can overteach a novel and kill the love of reading.  Gallagher offers suggestions on
how we can engage students in classic and contemporary novels.

Miller, Donalyn.  The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child.
Miller offers suggestions on how to create readers by connecting them with books they choose to read.
Her students are the middle grades.  However, her suggestions can be adapted for all grades.

I also recommend these two electronic resources for teens who want/love to write:

Teen Ink: Magazine, website & books written by teens since 1989
http://www.teenink.com

Figment: Write Yourself In
http://figment.com

CRT and School Libraries

In the latest edition of Knowledge Quest, Dr. Kafi Kumasi uses Critical Race Theory (CRT) to interrogate school library practices and school librarians’ belief systems as they relate to serving and supporting urban youth of color. The article offers several areas for examining this issue through the lens of CRT including: 1) disrupting cultural deficit views about youth of color; 2) honoring students’ voices and life experiences; 3) recognizing structural inequalities; and 4) understanding whiteness. This work has implications for helping school librarians develop the cultural competencies and dispositions necessary for creating library programs that support and affirm urban youth of color. 

The citation for this article is:

Kumasi, K. (2012). Roses in the Concrete: A Critical Race Perspective on Urban Youth and School Libraries. Knowledge Quest, 40 (5), pp 32-37. 

The article can accessed at:  http://tinyurl.com/6wk7v9d
 

Minority babies outnumbered white newborns in 2011

Today it was announced that minority babies outnumbered white newborns in 2011 for the first time in U.S. history. What does this mean for school libraires? For public libraries? For the publishing industry? How does this relate to and impact the literacy achievement of African American male youth?

Counterstories and Voice

In the first chapter to our book, Urban Teens in the Library, Denise Agosto and I argue that in order to successfully provide library services to urban teens, we must move beyond the racial and socioeconomic biases that pervade the popular culture, as well as our own preconceptions (misconceptions) and see them as individuals, not as members of a stereotyped group. The same is true for African American male youth. Many educators, administrators, policymakers, and members of the general public "buy" into stereotypes and interpret cultural and racial differences as a deficit.  This often leads schools to lower their academic expectations of African American male youth, to track them into remedial classes, or to place a disproportionate number in special education. As Chimamanda Adichie explains in her TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story, “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

One of the central tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the concept of voice. CRT research suggests that one of the key ways to shift the lens through which we view African American male youth (i.e. move beyond the single story) is through the use of personal narrative and story.

Sharon Flake’s poem “You Don’t Even Know Me” is a powerful example of a counterstory—a story that challenges the story of the dominant culture. In the poem, performed in a video by students from Roseville High School in Minnesota, a black teen rebukes his teachers, neighbors, and even his friends for making assumptions about his academic ability, his career aspirations, and his behavior based on stereotypes: “You know/ I’ve been wondering lately/ Trying to figure out just how it could be/ That you can see me so often/ And don’t know a thing about me” (2010, p. 4).

We have invited a group of young men from North Carolina Central University, UNC Charlotte, and a local high school to participate in the summit—to tell us their stories and to help us reimagine what libraries should look like and be like in order to truly meet the needs of African American male youth.

How have you involved African American male youth in your library programming and planning? In your research? How have you given them voice? What counterstories did they tell?

Welcome to the conversation!

In a recent report entitled A Call for Change: The Social and Educational Factors Contributing to the Outcomes of Black Males in Urban Schools, the Council of the Great City Schools calls the achievement gap for African-American males a “national catastrophe” and notes that “there is no concerted national effort to improve the education, social and employment outcomes of African-American males” (p. 11).  Next month in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the library community will come together with authors, publishers, policymakers, researchers, and educators in a summit entitled Building a Bridge to Literacy for African-American Male Youth: A Call to Action for the Library Community. Our goal is to become part of the national effort to improve the quality of education and life for African-American males in the United States.  Over the course of two and a half days, we will share our experiences, our challenges, and our ideas in three areas: research (what is known about the literacy development and needs of African-American male youth and additional gaps that need to be filled); programs & services (what programs and services work to support the literacy needs of African-American male youth and what gaps exist); and resources (what resources are needed to enable school and public libraries to effectively address the literacy needs of African-American male youth).

Taking action on the national crisis surrounding the literacy achievement of African-American males is an extension of the mission of public and school libraries to support lifelong learning.  We believe the library community is eager to embrace this challenge, but we can’t do it alone.  We hope that you will use this blog to join our discussion by providing us with feedback on our stories and ideas and by sharing your own.  You can get involved in other ways too: visit the summit website, follow our Twitter hashtag (#bridge2lit), and be on the lookout for our upcoming webinar and white paper after the conclusion of the summit.  As we continue to plan for the summit itself, a key theme that we keep returning to is the idea that words – whether written or read, spoken or heard – are powerful.  So we hope that you add your words to ours by contributing to the media surrounding this effort. Welcome to the conversation!